question about GA-P35-DS4 drivers

Hey all. I am just setting up a new machine with ths GA-P35-DS4
mobo. One question I have is that when I first setup it, I pretty
much accepted most of the defaults for the BIOS and then installed
XP. Everything went fine and it was working. Then I inserted the
mobo driver disc and installed everything, which included a Gigabyte
raid driver of some kind. I do not have an actual raid array and
don't plan to, but I do currently have my two SATA2 HD's plugged into
the purple SATA sockets on the mobo.

1 - Is this driver necessary if I am not running a raid? I mean, xp
installed and worked without it. When I removed this driver after
installing it, windows became unbootable.

2 - What is the difference between the orange and purple internal SATA
connectors on the mobo? I am under the impression that somehow the
purple ones have higher bandwidth potential, which is why I plugged my
HD's in there. They are SATA2. The others are only SATA, I
guess. ?? So if I am using SATA2, I must use the purple to take full
advantage and I must install the raid drivers and run in non-raid
mode?

3 - What is the difference between ICHR9 and Gigabyte Sata2? Do I
have this right? The manual is a little unclear to me which Raid
thing is which and which the various modes are. I will probably not
ever use mirroring or raid on this box, so I just want simple modes
anyway, but I want the fastest modes possible.

Thanks so much in advance.

Steve Schow a écrit :
Hey all. I am just setting up a new machine with ths GA-P35-DS4
mobo. One question I have is that when I first setup it, I pretty
much accepted most of the defaults for the BIOS and then installed
XP. Everything went fine and it was working. Then I inserted the
mobo driver disc and installed everything, which included a Gigabyte
raid driver of some kind. I do not have an actual raid array and
don't plan to, but I do currently have my two SATA2 HD's plugged into
the purple SATA sockets on the mobo.

1 - Is this driver necessary if I am not running a raid? I mean, xp
installed and worked without it. When I removed this driver after
installing it, windows became unbootable.

2 - What is the difference between the orange and purple internal SATA
connectors on the mobo? I am under the impression that somehow the
purple ones have higher bandwidth potential, which is why I plugged my
HD's in there. They are SATA2. The others are only SATA, I
guess. ?? So if I am using SATA2, I must use the purple to take full
advantage and I must install the raid drivers and run in non-raid
mode?

3 - What is the difference between ICHR9 and Gigabyte Sata2? Do I
have this right? The manual is a little unclear to me which Raid
thing is which and which the various modes are. I will probably not
ever use mirroring or raid on this box, so I just want simple modes
anyway, but I want the fastest modes possible.

Thanks so much in advance.

i just made a machine with the GA_EP35_DS3R
i might be wrong but the orange connectors are SATA2 also
so i set them IDE mode and put my SATA2 HD's and my DVD burner on
i set the purple ones RAID/AHCI mode to use eSATA (did no try eSATA
yet because my HD's went into the machine ...
sorry for my english hope that helps
J-M

On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:54:59 -0700 (PDT), Steve Schow
wrote:

Hey all. I am just setting up a new machine with ths GA-P35-DS4
mobo. One question I have is that when I first setup it, I pretty
much accepted most of the defaults for the BIOS and then installed
XP. Everything went fine and it was working. Then I inserted the
mobo driver disc and installed everything, which included a Gigabyte
raid driver of some kind. I do not have an actual raid array and
don't plan to, but I do currently have my two SATA2 HD's plugged into
the purple SATA sockets on the mobo.

1 - Is this driver necessary if I am not running a raid? I mean, xp
installed and worked without it. When I removed this driver after
installing it, windows became unbootable.

The purple SATA connectors is driven by the Gigabyte SATA chip, which
is actually a JMicron JMB363 controller. Are you saying you were able
to install Windows on a drive connected to the JMicron SATA chip
without having to load a driver (via F6) during Windows setup?

2 - What is the difference between the orange and purple internal SATA
connectors on the mobo? I am under the impression that somehow the
purple ones have higher bandwidth potential, which is why I plugged my
HD's in there. They are SATA2. The others are only SATA, I
guess. ?? So if I am using SATA2, I must use the purple to take full
advantage and I must install the raid drivers and run in non-raid
mode?

Both the Intel ICH9R and JMicron SATA controllers support SATA2.

3 - What is the difference between ICHR9 and Gigabyte Sata2? Do I
have this right? The manual is a little unclear to me which Raid
thing is which and which the various modes are. I will probably not
ever use mirroring or raid on this box, so I just want simple modes
anyway, but I want the fastest modes possible.

The ICH9R interface is part of the Intel chipset, and when its SATA
interface is configured as non-AHCI nor non-RAID, Windows XP setup
should be able to see the drives without needing any driver.

Thanks so much in advance.

"Andy" wrote in message
...
snip
1 - Is this driver necessary if I am not running a raid? I mean, xp
installed and worked without it. When I removed this driver after
installing it, windows became unbootable.

The purple SATA connectors is driven by the Gigabyte SATA chip, which
is actually a JMicron JMB363 controller. Are you saying you were able
to install Windows on a drive connected to the JMicron SATA chip
without having to load a driver (via F6) during Windows setup?

I'm fairly certain you don't need a driver during setup if you set the
JMicron controller to IDE mode in the BIOS.

It could be XP setup used it's own generic driver and when he installed the
RAID driver, then removed it there was no driver assigned to the raid
controller.

He probably could have moved the disk to one of the intel controllers,
(assuming a single disk system), and it would have booted - there is also
the "Last known good configuration" option which usually works with bad/
removed drivers.

snip

Thanks everyone for your replies. So I wonder, is there any advantage
to using the Gigabyte purple controllers versus the orange Intel
ones? I read somewhere that perhaps the gigabyte ones might be a bit
better in some way. I'm not using any raid arrays, just trying to
make sure I have the best HD performance I can get.

I think you're right that if I don't bother to install the software
that comes on the mobo driver disc, then it works fine through the
purple. once I install it, I can't remove it. Not sure why. If I
install it and then remove it, then I can't boot to windows after
that. For right now I have it installed and am in IDE mode and
hopefully that is the way for best performance, I'm not really sure.
I just have to remember to never uninstall it, or try to figure out
what else I need to do if I want to uninstall it again, to prevent
windows from becoming unusable. Or perhaps in the future I will avoid
installing it at all if in fact the provided XP driver is equally
performant for IDE only mode.